The present invention relates generally to computer networks, and more particularly to monitoring traffic characteristics between gateways in a computer network.
An overlay network is a computer network built on the top of another network. Nodes in the overlay can be thought of as being connected by virtual or logical links, each of which corresponds to a path, perhaps through many physical links, in the underlying network.
An overlay network is a computer network which consists of several edge routers that are put up over an underlying physical computer network. Within an overlay network, each gateway needs to monitor the performance of the connectivity it has to the other networks. In general, it requires understanding the throughput and loss rate between a given pair of gateways.
In current state of the art, there are several approaches available for monitoring network performance. However, the known monitoring approaches typically generate additional traffic workload in the network or suffer from inaccurate network performance measurements.